SIM2 Grand Cinema HT3000E Projector - SIM2 Grand Cinema HT3000E

Summary

Our Score

9/10

Review Price free/subscription

The full HD DLP chipset is not the end of what makes the HT3000E tick. It's also sensationally bright by home projection standards, using proprietary Unishape lamp technology to crank out almost twice as much brightness from a 200W lamp as the already luminous HT3000 that this new model replaces. In case you were wondering, the Unishape system allows the lamp to adjust its output based on the particular colours being shown.

More colour-related cleverness comes from the HT3000E's employment of Texas Instruments' BrilliantColor system. Combining colour-boosting processing with a new colour wheel that adds magenta, yellow and cyan to the familiar red, green and blue segments, BrilliantColor is designed to boost the saturation and tones of colours across the spectrum.

As if all this wasn't enough, the HT3000E also uses SIM2's proprietary AlphaPath technology, which pushes the light through the projector's optical array in an unusually efficient way, reducing the potential for loss or contamination of the light source.

Putting some figures on the results of all this high-falutin' projector ingenuity, the HT3000E boasts a sparklingly high claimed contrast ratio of 6,500:1, and a colour temperature perfectly aligned with the ‘D65' standard acknowledged to be the best for watching films and TV.

The only minor bum note in our experience of the HT3000E comes with its operating system, which employs some horribly bland and really very unintuitive onscreen menus. Our advice would be to get the thing professionally installed and calibrated, and then not touch it other than to change the input it's showing.

With full HD DLP projectors now going for as little as £2,000, the HT3000E's extra optical and processing power really needs to go some to justify its vastly elevated price. So it's a testament to how good it is that we came away feeling that £10k really wasn't bad value at all. Essentially, by reproducing all the key elements of picture performance that make a commercial cinema rock, the HT3000E really does recreate the experience of going to the Odeon in the comfort of your living room.

Take black levels, for instance. So often the weak point in a home projector's arsenal, here the HT3000E reproduces inky blacks that give dark scenes a real sense of depth and dynamism - especially since the blackness looks so completely natural thanks to the retention of subtle colour and shading information. On lesser projectors this information is usually lost, leaving dark areas looking rather hollow. Naturally this talent makes the HT3000E a particularly great friend of your average sci-fi or horror movie - not to mention dark games like, um, The Darkness…